The deuce you say! This Paper of Record flash only surprises to the extent that the New York Times covered this topic at all. “Are the protests unsafe?” its headline asks and then adds: “What the experts say may depend on who protests against what.”
We have realized, we have realized:
So when conservative anti-blockade protesters gathered on the steps of the state capitol in places like Columbus, Ohio, and Lansing, Michigan, in April and May, epidemiologists scolded them and predicted growing infections. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp relaxed the restrictions on businesses in late April as tests were delayed and infections increased, public health circles spoke of that state’s acceptance of human sacrifice. .
And then, the brutal murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis on May 25 changed everything.
Soon, the streets across the country were filled with tens of thousands of people in a mass protest movement that continues to this day, with protests and the collapse of statues. And instead of denouncing mass meetings, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a letter of support on May 30, and many joined the protests.
That reaction, and the contrast with epidemiologists’ previous fervent support for the shutdown, raised an awkward question: Did the public health council in a pandemic depend on whether people approved of the mass meeting in question? For many, the answer seemed to be “yes”.
Note that there have been minor differences between the two protests from a scientific / broadcast perspective, and those differences run against this trend. The shutdown protests generally involved dozens of people, sometimes hundreds, with inconsistent masking and distancing practices at best. They were also generally unique events, with Michigan being the most obvious exception. The protests that followed Floyd’s murder, on the other hand, have been ongoing, involving thousands, if not tens of thousands, and with zero detachment and lackluster use of masks.
If the shutdown protests were a crisis for future spikes, then so are Floyd’s protests. The latter would be a greater risk due to its size, density and duration. So why do epidemiologists not warn about them? New York Times columnist Thomas Chatterton Williams warned a month ago in The Guardian, linked in today’s NYT report, that the Left was distorting science in the same way that conservatives accuse, to serve their own Political purposes.
The bottom line, Williams concludes, is that public health experts “have bled credibility and authority”:
Less than two weeks ago, the enlightened position in both Europe and America was to exercise nothing less than extreme caution. Many of us went much further, turning to social media to punish others for insufficient social estrangement or for neglecting to wear masks or daring to believe that they could maintain a normal appearance of life during the coronavirus. In late April, when the state of Georgia moved to end its blockade, the Atlantic published an article titled “Georgia Experiment on Human Sacrifice.” Two weeks ago we embarrassed people for being on the street; today we shame them for not being on the street.
As a result of the blockades and quarantines, many millions of people around the world have lost their jobs, exhausted their savings, missed their loved ones’ funerals, postponed cancer screenings, and generally put their lives on the line. waiting for an indefinite future. They accepted these sacrifices as horrible but necessary when faced with an unstoppable virus. Was this or was it not a futile exercise?
“The risks of congregating during a global pandemic should not prevent people from protesting racism,” NPR suddenly tells us, citing a letter signed by dozens of US public health and disease experts. “White supremacy is a lethal public health problem that predates and contributes to Covid-19,” the letter said. An epidemiologist has gone even further, arguing that the public health risks of not protesting the end of systemic racism “far outweigh the damage from the virus.”
The right to deny climate change is often ridiculed, correctly, for politicizing science. However, the way the coronavirus public health narrative has been reversed overnight seems very much like … politicizing science.
Williams warned at the time that the whiplash of this manipulated message would have a devastating long-term impact on the credibility of these experts. What happens when these same experts urge people to get vaccinated with a new compound? How about we need a new round of stops?
It turns out that reverting reopenings has already become a serious problem, along with the issue of masking. This blatant politicization of science has damaged the credibility of officials, and the fact that the NYT is finally reporting on it shows just how risky that damage is. The problem is that the experts themselves have not yet learned the lesson:
Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston, studies Covid-19. When, wearing a mask and standing on the brink of a large wave of people, she attended a recent protest in Houston supporting Mr. Floyd, a sense of contradiction drew her.
“I certainly condemned the protests against the blockade at the time, and I am not condemning the protests now, and I am struggling with that,” he said. “I have a hard time articulating why that’s okay.”
Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, described a similar struggle.
“Instinctively, many of us in public health have a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice,” said Professor Lurie. “But we must be honest: a few weeks earlier, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying it was dangerous behavior.”
“I’m still dealing with it.”
While facing political manipulation, the people they hope to influence have stopped dealing with their advice. Instead of listening to the instructions of the scientists who speak within their limited experience, people listen to the political manifests of the defenders and act accordingly. They have no one to blame but themselves for that outcome, just like the CDC idiots who spent weeks insisting that the masks were useless now have no one to blame but themselves for the people they did not. They will listen to your advice now to start using them.
If experts want to retain credibility, they should take better care of it. And that also applies to the mainstream media outlets that spent the past month pretending that this problem did not exist at all, including the New York Times. Zeynep Tufecki of the Atlantic points out that the Gray Lady has been as hyperbolic and inclined as any other means of communication when it comes to going to the beach, for example, that it is much less risky than meeting shoulder to shoulder to protest:
In other words, one can hardly imagine a comparatively safer environment than a windy, sunny ocean beach. Not that there is any activity with absolutely zero risk, but the beach can be as good as possible, if people remain socially distant, which is much easier to do on a large beach.
And yet, many news organizations have taken over the beaches and scenes of beach lovers, as a sign of why things are so bad in the United States.
For example, a New York Times The article on the “disturbing” number of younger cases featured a beach photo with two women, in bikinis, who are far away from everyone else in the frame of the picture, who are also clearly far from everyone else, alone. or in small groups. They are demonstrating the ideal precautions that public health experts have been begging us to take for months. Similarly, a Washington Post The article that talks about how Myrtle Beach, South Carolina became “a coronavirus Petri dish” includes an image with the caption “Crowds pack the beach in Myrtle Beach”, but the few people in the photo are separated by tens or even hundreds of feet, at least, and there are no crowds or packaging. …
A pandemic is a communications emergency, as the saying goes, and the only effective way to communicate risk effectively is to tell people the truth in plain language and give them evidence-based advice to reduce risk. Furious scolding over the least risky part of a potentially risky chain of activities is sure to fail. When we scold, people stop listening, especially when they realize that scolding is not based on evidence, and eventually they will. When authorities close parks and beaches without strong scientific evidence, socialization can move to more dangerous places within sight.
They have already discovered that scolding is free from evidence and science, even when it comes from scientists, and especially when it comes from the media.
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